Not to toot my own horn, but I was a top student in high school. My schedule was packed with honors and AP classes and extracurricular activities galore. I maintained a GPA of 3.9 (unweighted, that is) and still had time to tutor my peers.
However, this all came crashing down spring of 2002, my senior year. I remember my dad coming in with the mail, and amid the Penny Savers and dELiA*s catalogs and other junk there was a slender envelope from the University of California Los Angeles. A call from my Mecca. I neatly sliced open one end of the envelope with a butter knife in hopes that I would save my first acceptance letter from my dream school. Lesson learned: light envelopes from schools was a big fat sign of rejection.
The torture and pain didn't stop there. I went to my AP English class the next day to find half of the class dancing in elation, and the other half sulking in resentment like me. But my teacher really topped that sundae of depression with a stinging cherry when he announced that Roger, the student I had been tutoring in both English and Calculus, got accepted to Harvard University.
Wtf?
How the hell did this happen? What kind of crazy world do we live in? I'll tell you. It's the kind of world where your whole future depends on a stupid 4 hour test. A test not of intellect nor skills, but of memorizing and regurgitating bullshit. The SATs.
The SATs is perhaps one of the biggest scams in academic history. This standardized test that is supposed to ease the application review process has become a crutch for university admissions offices. Pretty much anyone who doesn't get a less than stellar performance on this P.O.S. test is thrown into the reject pile, without any regard to scholastic performance, talent, or any other je ne sais quoi that can't be measured by numbers. Albert Einstein failed math; who knows what other geniuses our oh-so-fine education system may turn down.
So in order to even get a second glance from the lazy admissions boards, one must get a high score. But no matter how much they drill you in English class with SAT vocab, you'll only recognize 25% of the words on the test because they pull the other 75% out of their asses. So in order to get a high score, you must learn how to take the test (oh yes, that makes perfect sense). This means SAT school, which costs $3,000...minimum.
Which leads back to my theory that the SATs is the biggest scam ever. They have a monopoly on higher education. Think about it; 99.9997% of all universities require SAT scores for admission. So let's say only half of American high school students take the test; that's about 5 million. Test fees are about $50. That's $250 million of revenue generated. And that's not including retakes, SAT II, or licensing fees for the SAT classes. Does it really cost hundreds of millions of dollars to administer a test?
So I'm calling you out, College Board, you and your unsatisfactory rating with the Better Business Bureau. And I'm especially calling you out CEO Gaston Caperton, you and your $850K annual salary. A non-profit organization making millions without actually helping young people better their future? It's a catch-22, a scheme for the rich to stay rich and the poor to lay struggling in the trenches. Ok, maybe that's a little extreme. But there are alternative solutions to a standardized exam monopoly. Colleges could create their own tests for applicants to take. And the $50 per student for test fees? How about that actually going to subsidize student fees? I'm sure those schools would rather take that $250 million for themselves than let Caperton wipe his butt with it.
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